PETE   ROBINSON
THE HUMAN SKELETON
(above)  1912 news ad.  Pete is being promoted as "the Cigarette Fiend".  Cigarette smoking was much maligned at the time.  The smoker of the "paper pipe" was even considered worse than an opium addict!  Although some back-end shows featured "real opium dens", Pete's act was a precursor to the "dope shows" that were to follow many years later.
Pete is a hard one to pin down when it comes to the facts.  According to promotional news stories he started in the business in 1899 at age 20.
Pete was also billed at times as the "Skeleton Dude"
(above)  News story of the wedding of Pete and "Baby Bunny" Smith in Nov. 1924. Actually, I found a record of the two having been married in New York in 1916. Bunny would have been 18 and Pete 37.  Looks like the two got "married" over and over again whenever they felt the need for a little self-promotion.

(right, photo detail)  Pete, Bunny and the other  players at the Harlem-Amusement Palace in NYC pose for noted circus photographer Edward Kelty in the winter of 1924.
Another newsphoto, 1924.  Supposedly the odd couple met in 1916 at a Coney Island sideshow.
(right) 1928,  "A Trip To Coney Island" was the first and only time the freak show made a successful and profitable jump to vaudeville. Pete is here referred to simply as "The Human Skeleton" and Bunny as "Mrs. Pete Robinson".
There were plenty of skinny people around but Pete was one of the last of the Human Skeletons - people who were skin-on-bones thin due to some disease or medical condition.  "Shadows", as thin men were called in the business, were always very hard to come by so Bunny wasn't exagerrating when she once told a reporter that "he's a big sideshow attraction and really very valuable." Did Bunny see in Pete a meal ticket? Was Pete looking for companionship? Or, in the end, did it all really matter?
(above)  Pete appeared in MGM's "Freaks" which was filmed in late 1931.  The still above is from a scene near the beginning of the film.  Pete is playing the harmonica while the other "children" listen in.  For comfort, Pete requested an extra blanket for this scene which put off half-man Johnny Eck (far left) who proclaimed that if he had legs "he would have laid on a fakir's bed of nails." 
   But in Pete's defense, due to his medical condition and the resultant lack of fatty tissue, his body was very sensitive to the surface of whatever he sat or lay down upon.
(above)  1933.  This is the last mention I could find of Pete. I do not know when Pete passed away but he would have been 54 years old in 1933.  Unfortunately, due to their syndrome, many thin men did not live to see their 60th birthdays.
(left) Photo detail, another Kelty photo, Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey "Congress of Freaks", 1927, Madison Square Garden. On Bunny's right is Miss Artorio, Tatooed Wonder and on Pete's left is King Charles Roy, albino and son of the famed albino dislocationist "Rob Roy".
Go HERE for another great photo of Pete at showhistory.com